No other organization in history has
captured the attention and the curiosity of
modern readers as completely and as
intriguingly as the medieval Order of monks
known as the Knights Templar, and the
beginnings of that popular fascination
sprang from the 1982 publication of the
Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln book, Holy
Blood, Holy Grail. I know with absolute
certainty that my own interest in the Order
of the Temple was kindled by reading that
work, because although I had always found
the Templars fascinating, because of the
mystery and the mysticism surrounding them,
it was after reading Holy Blood, Holy
Grail that I first thought, There has
to be a truly great story hidden in there
somewhere, if a guy could just strip away
all the layers of obfuscation and find a way
to really look at who these people were, and
what made them tick. I had always
believed that the Knights Templar were real,
very human people, despite the fact that,
back when I was a boy, the only pictures we
had of them were stylized stone figures
carved on medieval tombs, and the only
reports we ever read of them told us they
were a villainous and evil breed, condemned
and excommunicated by the Church as heretics
and apostates.

The grasping Norman knights in Ivanhoe were
all Templars, as were the lowering, black-avisaged
villains in several other tales I read in
boyhood, and one seldom heard, or read,
anything good of the Knights Templar. They
were always evil, threatening stereotypes
And yet there was a quiet, logic-bound area
of my awareness that recognized other,
seldom listed and infrequently mentioned
aspects of Templar history: they existed as
an Order for less than two hundred years,
and for most of that time they were the
legitimate standing army of the Catholic
Church; they invented and perfected the
first sophisticated, credit-and-gold-bullion
based international banking system, and they
financed all the kings and kingdoms of
Christendom. They also amassed the largest
and most impressive portfolio of real estate
holdings known to history, and to protect
their enormous trading fleet they developed
the largest navy in the world. Their black
and white naval ensign, a white skull and
crossbones on a black field, struck the fear
of God into pirates everywhere.

Most impressive of all, however, to a
storyteller, was the awareness that their
meteoric career effectively came to an end
in a single day, on Friday the Thirteenth of
October, 1307, a date, to paraphrase
Franklin Roosevelt, that will live forever,
if not in infamy, then at least in mystery.
And so were born in my mind the elements of
my Tale of the Templars: The Beginnings,
designed and brought about, history tells
us, by nine penniless men—two of whose names
we do not even know today—who spent years
digging in the bowels of Jerusalem and
unearthed a treasure that made them the most
powerful and influential force on earth for
two centuries; The Middle, when an army of
monks, all of them wearing the equal-armed
cross of the Order of the Temple, formed a
standing army in the Holy Land and fought to
the death, hopelessly outnumbered by the
swarming legions of Saladin’s Saracens, in a
vain attempt to preserve an impossible
dream; and The End, when the Order was
overthrown in a single day by the sinister
lieutenant of a grasping, ambitious king,
and only a few escaped to foster and nurture
a legend and a tradition of hope and
regeneration.

In writing these novels for modern readers,
I have had to deal with the French names of
my major characters… All the original
Templar knights were French and nobly born,
which meant that their names all had a “de”
in the middle, as in Geoffroi de Bouillon,
André de Montbard, Hugues (Hugh) de Payens,
etc. The reason for that is that family
names, or surnames, as we know them today,
were not in common use that long ago, and
most of the identifiable names that existed
sprang from the family’s birthplace or
region. If a man called Guillaume (William)
was born in a certain town or city, like
Chartres in France, then he would be known
as William of Chartres . . . Guillaume de
Chartres. That makes for tough reading in
modern English, and so I have made
allowances, dropping the “correct” French
names in many instances, although not all
instances, in favor of simplifying things
for modern readers. I have given all my
characters “modern” sounding names, simply
by Anglicizing their first names wherever
possible and dropping the “de” between their
first and second names in many instances.
Thus Geoffroi de St. Omer becomes simply
Godfrey St. Omer, Archambaud de St. Agnan
becomes Archibald St. Agnan, and Payen de
Montdidier becomes Payn Montdidier, but
Hugues de Payens, the founder of the Knight
Templar, becomes Hugh, yet remains Hugh de
Payens, because that is his historical
identity.

I also made a note to myself, back when I
first started writing these stories, to be
sure to explain a few of the things that
were normal eight or nine hundred years ago,
but which seem utterly alien and
incomprehensible to modern readers. For
example, no one—neither the clergymen who
planned the Crusades or the warriors who
fought in them—ever heard the words
“Crusades” or “Crusaders”. Those worlds came
along hundreds of years later, when
historians began talking about the exploits
of the Christian armies in the Middle East.
And the Crusaders’ word for the Holy Land
was Outremer—literally, The Land
Beyond The Sea. In addition to that,
medieval Europe was not called Europe. It
was called Christendom, because all the
countries in it were Christian. The name
“Europe” would not come along for a few more
centuries.

Even more difficult for modern people to
grasp is the idea that there was no Middle
Class in Medieval Europe, and there was only
one, all-powerful Church. There was no
capacity for religious protest and no
Protestants. Martin Luther would not be born
for hundreds of years. There were only two
kinds of people in Christendom: the Haves
and the Have-Nots (some things never
change,) otherwise known as Aristocrats and
Commoners, and both were male, because women
had no rights and no identity in the world
of medieval Christianity. The Commoners,
depending on which country they lived in,
were known as peasants, serfs, slaves and
mesnes, and they were uneducated and largely
valueless. The Aristocrats, on the other
hand, were the men who owned and ruled the
lands, and they were divided into two
halves—Knights and Clerics. There were no
other options. If you were first born, you
inherited. If you were not first born, you
either became a knight or a cleric. From
Clerics, we get the modern word clergyman,
because all clerics were priests and monks,
but we also get the modern word clerk,
because all clerics were expected to be both
literate and numerate. Knights had no need
to be literate. Their job was fighting, and
they could hire clerics to keep their
records straight. Knights represented the
worldly order, whereas Clerics represented
God and the Church, and there was no love
lost between the two orders. On the most
basic level, knights existed solely to
fight, and clerics existed to stop them from
killing. That entailed the most fundamental
kind of conflict and led to anarchy and
chaos.

The Knights Templar, for a multiplicity of
reasons, became the first religious Order
ever entitled to kill in the name of God.
They were the first and the greatest of
their kind, and this is their story.